Radiocarbon dating of 'ancient' camel bones suggest error in Bible

Washington, Feb. 6: Archaeologists have used radiocarbon dating to pinpoint the arrival of domestic camels in the Middle East - and found that the science directly contradicted the Bible's version of events.

In biblical stories of Abraham, Joseph and Jacob, camels are mentioned as pack animals, Old Testament stories that historians peg to between 2000 and 1500 BC.

But Erez Ben-Yosef and Lidar Sapir-Hen of Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology and Near Eastern Cultures claim that the camels weren't domesticated in Israel until centuries later, which is more like 900 BC, Fox News reported.

To find the first camel, Sapir-Hen and Ben-Yosef analyzed the oldest known camel bones in the Arabian Peninsula, which were found at the remains of a copper smelting camp in the Aravah Valley that runs along the border with Jordan from the Dead Sea to the Red Sea.

The researchers said that the bones were in archaeological layers dating from the last third of the 10th century BC or later - centuries after the patriarchs lived and decades after the Kingdom of David, according to the Bible.

The few camel bones that were found in earlier archaeological layers may have belonged to wild camels that archaeologists believe lived there during the Neolithic period or even earlier. (ANI)